DUBAI: On Feb. 26, 2015, disturbing footage emerged from northwestern Iraq showing Daesh militants smashing pre-Islamic artefacts and burning ancient manuscripts at the Mosul Cultural Museum.
The terrorist group had seized control of the multi-ethnic city the previous year, and had set about looting everything of value and destroying anything that failed to conform to its warped ideology.
Priceless objects, spread across the museum’s three central halls, had told the singular narrative of Iraq as a land of remarkable civilizations from the Sumerians and the Akkadians to the Assyrians and the Babylonians.
A member of the Iraqi forces holds a damaged artifact in the museum on March 13, 2017. (AFP)
Assessing the damage: Isis blew up a carved platform in the museum’s Assyrian Hall, leaving an enormous crater Sebastian Meyer/Smithsonian Institution
When Pope Francis recently visited Mosul Iraq’s most diverse city, with historic Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Yazidi communities it was a piercing reminder of how its religious pluralism was targeted by the Islamic State (Isis). Occupying the city for three years, Isis’s fundamentalist fighters waged a battle for absolute control.
By the time Mosul was liberated by Iraqi government forces in July 2017, most of the artefacts in the Mosul Cultural Museum had been destroyed or looted. An international partnership was quickly launched to try and salvage what remained, coordinated by specialists from the Smithsonian Institution, the Musée du Louvre, the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage and the Aliph Foundation, which gave $1.3m in funding. The project has now entered its second phase: the reconstr
“I remember my first time there,” Richard Kurin, an ambassador-at-large for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, told Artnet News. “It was a total war zone.” He was among the first to visit the museum after the occupation ended.
A joint Iraqi-Smithsonian team works to document the damage in the Mosul Cultural Museum’s Assyrian Hall in February 2019. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
In addition to missing artifacts, some 25,000 volumes from the museum library had been burned and the buildings themselves had suffered considerable damage, most notably an 18-foot-long hole in the floor of the Assyrian hall, caused by a bomb. In minutes, ISIS had wrought destruction that would take years to repair.